Hi friends!

For the Winter season, we are reading Fantasy, Horror and Poetry for our Ifrits and Ink book club and you can see the spotlight titles above. You can choose to read any book in the other genres or these genres but we provide a spotlight to help with decision fatigue as there are a lot of options with each genre!

You guys as our paid tier member can help us choose the genres for the upcoming season: Spring! Vote below in the poll and if you have any preference with titles, let us know in the comments and I know it's super early but starting it early enough so we can have a chosen genre by mid of February and you guys can request books from your libraries or order them🥰

We're so excited to see what you all pick!

I'm hosting my second giveaway for Spring Bindery giveaways, which includes the following books:

• Burn the Sea by Mona Tewari

• Devil of the Deep by Falencia Jean-Francis

• Wayward Souls by Susan J Morris

• Black as Diamond by U.M. Agoawike

• This is not a Test by Courtney Summers

• Our Sister's Keepers by Jasmine Homes

• Saturn Returning by Kim Narby

Conditions of Giveaway:

• Subscribe to Chanterelle Solace by clicking Join Free in here!

• Comment down below which Arcs you'd like to be considered for (you can enter to multiple but you will only be selected to win one of them)

• Extra Entry: Every paid subscriber gets +3 extra entry

Early access to SWANA* Book Club things:

Click here on the Canva link: Story template & Instagram templates to gain early access to our story template and instagram template for SWANA Book Club as a Storygraph Challenge (which you can join here)! And scroll below to see early sneak peeks to our post coming out end of this week or early next week!

Here are some links to everything I've shared over the last few weeks:

• GoodReads for 2026 releases

• Pagebound List

*: SWANA Stands for South West Asia and North Africa and is a repalcement for MENA as a decolonised term

Sneak Peak at graphics coming out this week:

Here's a sneak peak at some of the graphics coming out for the book club this week in collaboration with one of our mods and another surprise collab! Please don't share this anywhere as it isn't the final version and may undergo some changes till then:

January Spotlights for book clubs:

This year, we have an ongoing Storygraph challenges for both of our book clubs and we will spotlighting certain books to help those of you who hate, well, picking!😂 For January, I have chosen what to spotlight and going forward, all our paid members can help us choose our spotlights

Cottagecore Gaming Club:

For January, the focus is to play a free game because well we're post holidays and I'd like to always be mindful of this from everyone's side! As a result, we're playing Palia! As a reminder, we are a text based club and chat primarily through discord about our game of the month

Ifrits & Ink: SWANA Book Club Spotlight:

Here is the link to our storygraph Challenge!

January: Fantasy, Horror & Poetry

• Fantasy: The Book of Heartbreak by Ova Ceren

• Horror: A Guide to the Dark

• Poetry: Forest of Noise by Mosab Abu Toha

Cottagecore & Co Spotlights:

Here is the link to this specific storygraph challenge

Here are our Cottagecore & Co spotlights friends! As we have 6 prompts on storygraph, we are focusing on three sub-genres and one of them ticks three boxes in one go

Here are the picks:

• Mushroomcore: Mexican Gothic by SIlvia Moreno-Garcia

• Cottagecore, Witchycore and Cozy: The Cottage around the Corner by D.L. Soria

• Botanical Horror: Midnight Rooms by Donyae Coles

I hope you guys decide to join us and read some of the picks or play Palia with us! Dont forget to join discord where the discussions tend to occur with our community

Don't forget to subscribe or upgrade for $5/£3.5 (its the cost of a cup of coffee or if you live in a city in this crazy economy, less than that) OR $12/£8-9 to get access to exclusive perks & help us build become a bindery imprint

Hi guys,

With the start of the year, we have concluded our first official giveaway and the winners have been contacted for more info and to let them win! This was a lovely giveaway and thank you all for not only participating but for being part of the paid tier in here. I appreciate you guys more than you'll ever know and can't wait to see what 2026 brings us!

Our next giveaway will be in March and while I do have some great items and theme, I'm also here for any suggestions you all may have

Can't wait to share more of what we have in plans for this year

So I heard you're looking for books to pre-order in preparation for 2026?👀

So you may have heard about pre-orders and you may have heard WHY its important but let's get into it a bit more, in a summarised manner! I will attach the resource of why you should pre-order the books, especially by marginalised authors who depend on these numbers to release more books, get a larger marketing budget (or a decent one), and show that there is a readership for their books!

THE GRAPHICS ARE ALL THE WAY IN THE BOTTOM WITH A BOOKSHOP.ORG UK AND US SHOPS to browse through and HERE is a goodreads list of all the available SWANA books too so you can add it in your TBR!!!!

Why are pre-orders important?

Thank you to authors who continue to educate us readers and the community on why Pre-orders are important! As someone who has been learning this throughout the year and advocating for it,

1. It shows publishers that we, as readers and well buyers, are interested in the books BiPOC authors are publishing

2. The more the book sells (yes, as a pre-order) the more marketing effort goes into it

3. It alerts bookshops, book subs...etc. that the book is doing well and they should stock more of it (this is so important because it shows it'll sell if they do buy it AND this allows more reader to find the book)

4. It helps the authors hit a best seller list (which does wonders for the author and the book)

In a world where SWANA authors make up less than 1% of the trad pub world (thank you to Jananie from Boundless Press for sharing this stats on threads, check her Bindery page out in here and check out Dust Settles North by Deena which was one of the SWANA 2025 releases) we need to continuously share and advocate for the authors who are here now and show that we want more of them!

So, what SWANA books are we pre-ordering in 2026?

Here's a list and attached to this blog post are the books you can click on to pre-order easily if you're in the US or access my bookshop.org list and get clicking! If you're in the UK, here is the bookshop.org list for you guys but some books are missing so I have added the link to get them elsewhere (some are affiliate).
Keep in mind, for some of the books, it is too early as they're not on the list YET but I will update and let you guys know when it is!

Here are the ones missing from bookshop.org:

• Our Ex's Wedding by Taleen Voskuni: Amazon (UK)

• Where No Shadow Stays by Sara Hashem: Amazon (UK), Blackwell's (UK)

• In the Country I Love by Alaa Al-Barkawi: Amazon (UK)

• Everything Comes back to you by Jackie Khalilieh: Amazon (UK)

• Letters from the Last Apothecary by Bita Behzadi: Amazon (UK)

• Ungodly Chaos by Selma Soren: Amazon (UK)

• Bashir Boutros and the Forgotten Realm by George Jreije: Amazon (UK)

AND FINALLY, here are the graphics of the list:

Thank you for subscribing to Chanterelle Solace and Ifrits & Ink! Please do consider joining as a paid member to help us become an imprint and support/uplift marginalised authors in the future for either $5 or $12